Recently, robots that verbally or nonverbally communicate with people have been proposed and are likely to increase in the future. In communication between people and robots, it is necessary to secure adequate personal space for people to occupy comfortably. Comfortable personal space varies for each person, but in human-to-human communication, people learn from each other how much distance should be kept and maintain comfort.
With respect to a robot that communicates with a person, for example, Patent Literature 1 below discloses a robot that calculates parameters for an optimal communication action on the basis of a moving distance and a facial orientation of a person during communication and secures appropriate personal space that an interaction partner can occupy comfortably or adjusts a frequency of matching a gaze with the partner.
Further, Patent Literature 2 below discloses a robot that adjusts a type of spoken content, a conversation distance, or a time for which eye contact is maintained in accordance with sensing familiarity based on a conversation distance with a communication target, a gaze position, a facial expression, and other sensing information.